Airborne ellipsoidal elevations and derived snow depths from Ka-, Ku-, C/S-band and lidar observations along CRYO2ICEANT22 under-flight (13 December 2022) along co-located CRYO2ICE (CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2) observations of snow depth using CryoTEMPO, FF-SAR and ESA-E CryoSat-2 processing chains

Description

Airborne multi-frequency altimetry observations (ellipsoidal heights) computed using threshold-first-maxima-retracker-algorithm (TFMRA) at 40, 50 and 80%, maximum scattering, and peakiness (PEAK) and continous wavelet (CWT) re-trackers. Methodology is described in related publication (will be added once sent to review in EGUsphere). Airborne ellipsoidal heights are compared with airborne laser observations (swath and nadir vertical profile) at both Ka-, Ku- and C/S-band. Furthermore, snow depth is derived using different combinations of re-trackers, and instruments.

Furthermore, snow depth is derived from the near-coincident laser and radar satellite altimeters ICESat-2 and CryoSat-2 along a CRYO2ICE orbit (during the under-flight where the airborne observations were carried out). Here, three snow depth estimates are proposed computed using three different CryoSat-2 products. These are compared with other snow depth estimates from CASSIS and AMSR2 (check data availability statement in preprint).

Finally, the airborne and CRYO2ICE snow depths are compared binned to the resolution of CRYO2ICE and to 25 km segments.

Files

• kuband_20221213_02_74_232_002, kaband_20221213_02_74_232_002, and snow_20221213_02_74_232_002: ellipsoidal elevations derived using different re-trackers. Includes also additional waveform information available from the original data provided by CReSIS.
• df_airborne_roughness: data file including all relevant airborne ellipsoidal elevations after postprocessing including application of offset calibration, identification of nadir laser profile, and lead/floe discrimination of the observations. Snow depth using different re-trackers is also available.
• "CRYO2ICE"-files: the estimates CRYO2ICE files + snow depth along satellites using three different CryoSat-2 products and the ICESat-2 ATL10 product.

Processing

Data produced using code provided at GitHub.